Just imagine you are a woman in your 30s, and the father of your three young children decides that he needs some space. Or perhaps you are a woman in your 50s, whose husband feels that he will be better able to face the rigours of middle age with a 25-year-old girl at his side. Or imagine for a moment you are 15, there's this boy you really, really like, but suddenly he has stopped returning your text messages and now he even appears to have blocked you on MSN...

What book does a thinking, feeling (if extremely bitter) woman pick up at this critical moment? I am quite clear about the books one throws into a bag when summoned to hospital - Jane Austen and Douglas Adams remain, for me, the best antidotes to fear, pain and hospital food. And I am also quite clear on the practical steps one can take when one is dumped (for me, a bottle of red wine and, when enough time has passed, rearranging the furniture). But what does a woman read - first, to restore one's faith in oneself, and, second, to restore one's faith in the value of relationships... or better still to make them gloriously irrelevant?

I suspect the answer does not lie with the 19th century novel. Darcy (and even Middlemarch's Will Ladislaw) are thoroughly enjoyable creations when things are going fine, but by a certain stage in life, and under certain painful emotional conditions, they are just plain irritating. Austen and George Eliot remain trapped by the expectations of their genre and their society. Novels end with marriage for women, and if not marriage, then death - and sometimes both.

But here my ignorance is emerging - the 19th century is a bit modern for me. (It has to be admitted that female protagonists in the novels of the 17th and 18th centuries don't offer much more inspiration, although Defoe's Roxana and Behn's Sylvia do at least squeeze in quite a bit of sex and crime before they die.)

There must be countless works of fiction from the 20th, or even the 21st, century that offer inspiration and consolation to women readers, inspiration and consolation more satisfying than the prospect of a Darcy or, God help us, a Heathcliff. So - what should be on that reading list?